Interesting. That does punch a hole in the idea that the history was used in writing the rebellion paper.
Here’s some more on Arianism from, Christianity, the First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Viking Press, 2009, pg. 213
Constantine next sponsored a council in an attempt (again not blessed with short-term success) to solve a dispute sparked in the Church of Alexandria. This was yet another episode, and in many ways one of the most decisive, in the long debates about Christology (that is, discussion of the nature and significance of Jesus Christ), and the relationship between Father and Son. An austere and talented priest there called Arius was concerned to make his presentation of the Christian faith intellectually respectable to his contemporaries. To achieve this, he would have to wrestle with the old Platonic problem of the nature of God. If God is eternal and unknowable as Plato pictured him, Jesus Christ cannot be in the same sense God, since we know of him and of his deeds through the Gospels. This means, since the supreme God is one, that Christ must in some respect come after and be other than the Father, even if we accept that he was created or begotten before all worlds. Arius’s opponents accused him of using as a slogan ‘There was when he was not’. Moreover, since the Father is indivisible, he cannot have created the Son out of himself; if the Son was created before all things, it would therefore logically follow that he was created of nothing.
Here, then, was Arius’s Christ: inferior or subordinate to the Father (as indeed Origen and other earlier writers had been inclined to say), and created by the Father out of nothing. In many respects, Arius was the heir of Origen and should be thought of as among theologians of Alexandrian outlook. It has been argued that Arius was not merely preoccupied by logic and that he had a warm concern to present Christians with a picture of a Saviour who was like them and participated in human struggles towards virtue; his Christ was part of the created order, not simply an image of God. Arius certainly found an affectionate following among ordinary Alexandrians, whom he taught simple songs about his ideas. Whatever his motives, by around 318 he had provoked an infuriated opposition in Alexandria, including his bishop, Alexander. Alexander would not be the last bishop to turn the fat that one of his clergy was a rather more acute thinker than himself into a matter of ecclesiastical discipline. His feelings cannot have been eased by the fact that Arius seems to have been previously associated with the rigorist schism of Melitius of Lycopolis.
It’s clear that Arius was onto something but lacked the revelation about the order of Creator Sons which we now have thanks to the UB. I can understand his heresy. Yet we are told that the Father and Son are one, no matter which way you chose to look at it. And this is because of the sovereignty of the Son earned through his seven bestowals, something else only recently revealed to us through the UB. It all makes sense now, but the ancients were trying to figure this out without the benefit of authoritative epochal revelation. And some of them came close with just personal revelation . . . I would say, very close.
We’d all be wise to personally admit we human mortals are not omniscient. This feature of being is attributed to the Paradise Father. Even Jesus did not say he is or was omniscient. We mortals are relegated to the opinion section of the bleachers of life!
